Growing Up
by Sera dy Relandrant
Summary: The gypsies come to Misselthwaite when Mary is thirteen.


**Growing Up**

_Dance with me  
Spin like fire; love like flame  
Carefree  
Sweet raindrops fall  
Silks they plaster themselves  
To our skin  
Sensuous and binding through  
The fiery rain; the icy fire  
Violins soar and drums pound  
Our ears pumped with blood pulsing  
Showered gold and silver streets  
Winding smoke it mellows us_

**inquistrix (Fictionpress)**

The gypsies come to Misselthwaite when Mary Lennox is thirteen. Mrs Medlock prims up her lips and mutters, "Stuff and nonsense" under her breath, but Uncle Archibald is more tolerant.

"Oh I've seen gypsies," he says, his voice distant, his eyes misting over with the memories. Colin puts down his Latin and Mary her needlework in anticipation of a story. "They are the dust on the road, the wind in the wind."

"Father?" Colin asked tentatively. His eyes widen in confusion and for a moment he looks almost childlike. Mary conceals her smile behind her hand - so His High and Mightiness _can _be surprised. A most refreshing turn of events.

But Uncle Archibald only shakes his head. "_Ut vestri dictata_," he says severely. "To your books. There'll be plenty of time for you to contemplate philosophy and poetry and potter about those things when you're older."

_His eyes are shining as he catches his cousin and whirls her around. Round and round they turn in the rose-garden and the sunlight dapples a thousand greens and golds in her spinning eyes. Mary shrieks and thumps he but he only laughs. She laughs too and when he sets her down, she catches his shoulders for the world is still spinning and she can't stand still. "I've enlisted," he whispers._

_She looks up at him, her eyes huge in admiration for her strong, brave, wonderful cousin. "I'm so proud of you," she whispers, her voice as soft as his, for she feels too many things to be able to express them in words. He links his arms around her waist with the familiarity of an old playmate. They stand together in the rose-garden, the last sunrays setting her pale hair and his dark eyes aflame. _

_He's just nineteen. _

_(The light leaves those dark eyes soon enough and they'll never be beautiful again.)_

Painted caravans wind over the heather-trails of the purple moor and the gypsies set up camp on Misselthwaite park. From her tapestried rooms, Mary can see ribbons of cooking-fire smoke and her mind drifts until the new governess raps her knuckles. "Gypsies can wait," Miss Wentworth says stiffly. "French cannot."

The locals run down to have their fortunes told for pennies, gamble coppers for cheap trinkets and watch the bearded goat perform its tricks. They stop and stare at the queer things on view and to watch the barefoot gypsy lass with eyes of molten fire dancing to the tambourine beat. The 'little missus' of the big house arrives more sedately, on the 'young master's' arm. Girls in petticoats of red-and-purple, their braids knotted with glittering tinsel and their eyes kohl-lined watch her. She shivers but she tells herself it's the frost-tongued wind, that's all.

"Aren't they queer?" she whispers, pressing Colin's arm. "Can you feel the Magic?" She says it with a capital M for she means _his _Magic.

"No," he says after a pause, his eyes lingering on the dancer's slender waist. Her eyes catch his and she smiles, dimples edging that razor's edge of a smile. He reddens and looks down. "I-I can't. What do you feel?"

"I can feel _a_ Magic," she says pensively. "But it's the wrong kind." She expects him to laugh at her because he often does nowadays and tells her she's an addle-brained little girl but he doesn't. His eyes are as pensive as hers and he looks more like a man than a boy.

_It's a merry-go-round of quilting bees and bandage-rolling committees and farewell-parties into which eighteen-year-old Mary is flung. It's her 'coming-out' year, a year that she ought to have spent in flirtations with suitors at London balls, at operas dressed in velvet and diamonds and tea-parties in lace frocks doing 'the season'. Instead she attends fundraisers and reads war-poems and sings about a soldier's honor with a dozen white-clad young girls in the church choir. Her eyes shine with the heady excitement that has captured the nation and there is no room in her heart for questions or doubt. _

_All the boys she knows are enlisting. Well almost all the boys. Just not Dickon._

It is not the Magic of green, sprouting things. It is not the Magic of little, chirping things. It is not a Magic she has ever known before._ They are the dust on the road, the wind in the wind. _

A woman with golden hoops in her ears and queer, knowing eyes tells her her fortune for a silver coin. It's the first time Mary hears one of the gypsies speak and it almost frightens her. Their liquid, sibilant consonants wrap around their words and it has a musical, magical quality to it. Quite different from the prosaic, broad, long-drawn Yorkshire dialect she's grown used to. "Beautiful young missss," the woman hisses. "You weel be rich and beloved and your lord, he will take you afar. To a land 'cross the black sea where you weel be his queen. Beautiful young missss, yes, that is so." It's the same fortune she hands out to every young girl who comes to her and Mary feels silly when she leaves the caravan. To think that she had associated Magic, Colin's beautiful Magic, with that penny-counting crone!

She wanders around the carnival-grounds, wondering about her cousin. "Excuse me," she asks one of the gypsy-men and he turns and blushes at the pretty young miss in her white coat with the twirling blue ribbons. "But have you seen Mr Colin Craven?"

"The young master?" he grunts. "Yes, li'l missy, I have so over there. But begging missy's pardon, missy ma'am, he wouldn't be looking to be disturbed. Not _now_," he adds significantly, waggling his eyebrows. Mary thinks he's shockingly pert but says nothing, not catching the significance of his words. She turns the corner, behind a honeycomb-cluster of deserted tents and finds him.

He has his arms around a girl. Her petticoat is hitched up to flash a pair of indecently-bared ankles. His fingers are entangled in the coils of her heavy, dark hair, his lips burning kisses on her slender, dusky neck.

The scene is seared evermore in Mary's memory.

_"You didn't enlist," Mary observes. She is resting, with an apple and a book, in the hollow of the old rose-tree. The tree from which Aunt Lilias had fallen, so many years ago. _

_Dickon, at her feet, looks up. "Tha' munnot mind," he says gravely. "It wouldn't be for tha' likes o' me." _

_"Oh I don't mind," Mary says warmly. "After all, what would we women do with all our laddies at the front?" He smiles when he hears little Miss Mary who'd been running around the manor in dimity frocks such a short time before - or so it seems - referring to herself as a woman. "But don't they rag you about it at home?" _

_(Don't you feel ashamed not to be going when everyone - your friends, your brothers - else is going?)_

_"Not mother," he says. "She understands." For a moment he wants to tell Miss Mary everything but he looks up at her again and his heart melts. She's just so young, so pure and innocent that it half breaks his heart. _

He knows that she knows but neither mention it. On the carriage-ride back to the manor it starts raining. Colin looks out, to avoid looking in and meeting Mary's accusing eyes. The soft, slanting grey rain forms a backdrop for his sharply-etched profile. She looks and looks at him, drinks him until she can't stop. He's just so handsome - her beautiful aunt back in the flesh - with that clear, white skin and those large agate-grey eyes rimmed with long, dark lashes curled at the tips...

She blushes and looks down at her hands.

Miss Wentworth measures her that afternoon. "You've grown an inch, I believe, Miss Lennox," she says. "And quite a charming young miss you're turning out to be."

"Colin grew _three _inches," Mary says sulkily.

"Ah well," Miss Wentworth says, unruffled. "He's turning out to be a handsome young gentleman, isn't he?" She reports to Mr Craven about her charges - Mary and Colin. Later, in his study, he ponders the governess's words. The woman's damned right - the children are growing up.

_Colin parades in his uniform, in front of the whole family, in the first drawing room. Miss Wentworth and Mrs Medlock sniffle into their handkerchiefs. He's so tall and broad-shouldered and manly that Mary can't quite meet his eyes. She feels impossibly young and girlish in her white house frock with the spray of pansies in her hair. Where has the spoilt little boy - the young rajah, she'd once likened him to - she grew up with, gone? _

_"I'm still the same Colin," he tells her when she ignores him throughout supper. "Your Colin." _

_It's hard to believe _that _until he takes off his uniform and dares her to a race, to see who can run fastest to the Secret Garden. She wins by a hair's breadth and he shrieks, protesting that she cheated. "Did not!" she cries, sticking out her tongue at him._

_"Did too!" he yells back. "Just you wait, Mistress Mary, I'll catch you!" They play hide-and-seek, her skirts catching against rosevines, blossoms and buds entangling in her braids. He trips on a mossy log and she shrieks with laughter and the whistling wind that weaves through her hair laughs too. _

_Hidden by the thick branches, Dickon sits in the tree and watches her. Pretty Miss Mary - will she ever quite grow up? _

_(And when she does he wonders why she had to so fast.)_

There is a fearsome storm the next day. "Heathenish place to be at," Miss Wentworth says soberly. "I can't stand the moor and I wonder that you can, Miss Mary."

"Oh that's because you're not used to it," Mary murmurs, setting down her Geography. "That's because you haven't seen the gorse and heather in spring, and you haven't smelt the spring fragrance or seen the ponies run wild... I used to hate it so before I learnt to love it."

"Hrmph," Miss Wentworth says. "I suppose I must take your word for it."

Lightning streaks against the ashen pall of the sky. The wind wuthers like a lost soul and the hair rises on Mary's forearms. Miss Wentworth crosses herself, mumbling prayers under her breath. And far away, the dying wood-notes of a flute. It is like the echo of song from distant hills, hills where pagans had bowed down to their painted gods of wood and stone. Wild and beautiful and almost unholy.

He's at his window, watching the storm weep into rain over the moor, when she visits him. She slips her hand into his. His flute is rough and unpolished, a gypsy's penny-toy. She knows, without asking, who's keepsake it was. And in her mind's eye she can see those eyes of molten fire, skimming across the purple moor and into his agate-grey eyes with perfect composure and perfect indifference. Those beautiful, restless eyes have skimmed across mountains and valleys, hamlets by the sea and incandescent cities. She can see those bare feet twirling to the tambourine beat or swinging above the caravan wheels that never stop.

"Dust on the road," he says softly, and his eyes seem to sear the grey-veiled moor, sheathed in lace of mist and rain.

"Wind in the wind," she murmurs. "Play a tune for me, Colin."

And so he plays, plays as Dickon, who taught him, has never played. Dickon would look up at the sky, tap Soot's beak, and smiling play for adoring Mary at his feet. Colin plays for no one but himself and his eyes as they look out are unseeing.

"That wasn't too nice," Mary tells him.

"It wasn't meant to be," he replies.

_In later years she will wonder at Walter Blythe, wonder how a Canadian lad in the Flanders trenches could express everything - all the tangled web of wild, wicked emotions - she felt so perfectly in a single little poem. But she is not the only war-sister who has suffered and she is not the only war-bride 'The Piper' touches. _

_She pins the rosebuds at her bosom on Colin's hat for at eighteen she has no lover to claim her flowers for his buttonhole. "Be a good boy," she whispers, looking up at him and willing the tears not to fall. She must be brave for him. _

_"Am I ever not?" he says, kissing her cheek. His eyes are fire to the subdued glow in hers. But his hands are still the hands of a boy, slender and white like carved ivory, like the hands of the beautiful woman in the portrait that hangs in his room. _

_(She will remember those hands when he comes back with stumps of flesh in place of arms.) _

_The Piper pipes and the boys she knew ride away into the sunset. When they come back, they're something less than the men they should have grown into. _

**A/N: Yeah, the Walter Blythe referred to is Anne Shirley's son (from the Anne of Green Gables series). Please review if you liked this!**


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